Archive

Fever:

Photography

Between

History

and the

Monument

Okwui Enwezor

The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities; that which determines that they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from far off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale.
-Michel Foucault
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No single definition can convey the complexities of a concept like the archive such as are contained in Foucault's ruminations on the subject. The standard view of the archive oftentimes evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers, filing cabinets, and shelves laden with old documents, an inert repository of historical artifacts against the archive as an active, regulatory discursive system. It is this latter formulation of the archive that has engaged the attention of so many contemporary artists in recent years.

Archive Fever explores the ways in which artists have appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured, and
interrogated archival structures and archival materials. The principal vehicles of these artistic practices-photography and film-are also preeminent forms of archival material. The exhibition engages with various modes of artistic production in which the traffic in photographic and filmic documents is not simply emblematic of the development of a vast mass-media enterprise. Rather, it delves into critical transactions predicated on opening up new pictorial and historiographic experiences against the exactitude of the photographic trace.

Photography and the Archive What are the aesthetic and historical issues that govern photography's relation to the archive? From its inception, the photographic event." Every photographic record has manifested "the appearance of a statement as a unique image has been endowed with this principle of uniqueness. Within that

principle lies the kernel of the idea of the photograph as an archival record, as an analogue of a substantiated real or putative fact present in nature. The capacity for mechanical inscription and the order of direct reference that links the photograph with the indisputable fact of its subject's existence are the bedrock of photography and film. The capacity for. accurate description, the ability to establish dis-

Enwezor

12

tinct relations of time and event, image and statement, have come to define the terms of archival production proper to the language of those mechanical mediums, each of which give new phenomenological account of the world as image. Photography is simultaneously the documentary evidence and the archival record of such transactions. Because the camera is literally an archiving machine, every photograph, every film is a priori an archival object. This is the fundamental reason why photography and film are often archival records, documents and pictorial testimonies of the existence of a recorded fact, an excess of the seen. The infinitely reproducible, duplicatable image, whether a still picture or a moving image, derived from a negative or digital camera, becomes, in the realm of its mechanical reproduction or digital distribution or multiple projection, a truly archival image. Accordingly, over time, the photographic image has become an object of complex fascination and thus appropriated for myriad institutional, industrial, and cultural purposes-governmental ments of archival modernity. When Walter Benjamin published his essay on art? in the 1930s, photography had been in use for a century. His reflections took up more than the question of aura; he was concerned with how the shift from the hand-fashioned image to the mechanically produced and infinitely reproducible image manifests a wholly new mode of pictorial distribution, a shift not only indexical but temporal. Because eye/hand coordination organized by the camera gave reality a different look, the liberation of the hand from image making had a deep impact on questions of cognition and action. This change of artistic and pictorial parameters became a specific phenomenon of modernity. The advent of mechanical reproduction initiated an archival formation that would overtake all relations to the photographic record: the systems of production and distribution and, more recently, the processes of permanent digital archivization and inscription. Since Kodak's invention of commercial processing capacity at the end of the nineteenth century, the photographic analogue derived from the negative has not only generated an endless stream of faithful reproductions-calling into question the foundational claims of also set the entire world originality on which the pictorial aura of hand-fashioned images depended-it propaganda, advertising, fashion, entertainment, personal commemoration, art. These uses make photography and film critical instru-

of users into a feverish pace of pictorial generation and accumulation. This archival madness, a "burning with desire" to transpose nature into a pictorial fact, and consequently into an archival system, is succinctly expressed in a letter written by Louis Daguerre to his business partner Nicephore Niepce: "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature.:" Many other desires soon followed, and would go beyond nature; they would encapsulate the entire mode of thinking the world framed within a picture. The desire to make a photograph, to document an event, to compose statements as unique events, is directly related to the aspiration to produce an archive. The character of this archive is captured in W. J. T. Mitchell's notion of "the surplus value of irnaqes.:" in which the photograph also enters the world of the commodity. The traffic in the photographic archive rests on the assumption of the surplus value that an image can generate.

The proliferation

of the snapshot, of domestic

photographic

production,

clarifies this process. a gigantic machine of

However, we know that in this guise of image production-its making of a photograph is part of a constant construction

crudest, most sentimental form-the

of eide-memoires,

time travel, as much teleological as technological. Stanley Cavell describes this in relation to automatism,S a mechanism through which we return to the past, compiling indexes of comparisons and tables of facts that generate their own public and private meanings. The snapshot that documents scenes of life's many turns-birthdays, holidays, and events of all kinds-perhaps exemplifies the most prominent aspect of the private motivations for image making, for it not only records that burning desire for the archival, it also wields a formidable ethnographic meaning. The photographic image, then, can be likened to an anthropological space in which to observe and study the way members and institutions of a society reflect their relationship to it. From family albums to police files to the digital files on Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, mobile phones, digital cameras, computer hard drives, and assorted file-sharing programs, a vast, shapeless empire of images has accrued. Organizing and making sense of them in any kind of standard unity is today impossible. At the same time, we have witnessed the collapse of the wall between amateur and professional, private and public, as everyday users become distributors of archival content across an unregulated field of image sharinq." In this prosaic form, the photograph becomes the sovereign analogue of identity, memory, and history, joining past and present, virtual and real, thus giving the photographic document the aura of an anthropological artifact and the authority of a social instrument. Beyond the realm of the snapshot is another empire-an imperium, to be specific-connected to a more regulative, bureaucratic, institutional order that invigilates and exercises control over bodies and identities. It was this order whose repressive function in the nineteenth century would combine Auguste Comte's philosophical positivism and a hermeneutics of power, along with the system to territorialize and unify knowledge from diverse sources, imbuing the system with scientific authenticity, even if its unity was fictive. Positivism fueled the emergence of many quasi-scientific endeavors, one such being Alphonse Bertillon's photographic police archives in Paris, in which he elaborated a

series of standardized tests and measurements to decipher the "criminal type. n In his seminal essay "The Body and the Archive,"? Allan Sekula reflects on the work of Bertillon, and of the English statistician and pioneer of eugenics Francis Galton, both of whom discovered in photography an instrument of social control and differentiation social deviance. underwritten by dubious scientific principles. Their projects, Sekula writes, "constitute two methodological
"8

poles of the positivist attempts to define and regulate

The criminal (for Bertillon) and the racially inferior (for Galton) exist in the nether-

world of the photographic archive, and when they do assume a prominent place in that archive, it is only to dissociate them, to insist on and illuminate their difference, their archival apart ness from normal society.

Enwezor

14

Archive as Form The photographic archive is one of the many ways in which archival production has been developed within the context of art. Marcel Duchamp's miniaturization of his entire corpus into a deluxe edition of reproductions, organized and codified in an archival system cum mobile r:nuseumtitled La bette-envalise (1935-41),9 is certainly not the first of such programmatic engagements of the work of art as archive, but it remains one of the most rigorous. Ever since he fashioned this ur-museum in a suitcase, there has existed a fascination within art with the procedures of the museum as archive, 10as a site of reflection on the prodigious output of historical artifacts, images, and the various taxonomies that govern their relationship to one another. By faithfully creating reproductions of his works that approximate photographic facsimiles, and at the same time creating the conditions for their organization and reception as an oeuvre and an archive, Duchamp appeared to have been grappling with a dilemma, one which placed his works "between tradition and oblivion," to borrow an apt phrase from Foucault.!" La botte-en-velise is not only a sly critique of the museum as institution and the artwork as artifact, it is fundamentally also about form and concept, as "it reveals the rules of a practice that enable statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of stetements='? Decades later, such a system was amplified by Marcel des Aigles (1968).13 If the framework for Broodthaers in his Musee d'Art Moderne, Department

Duchamp's box is the myth of a coherent monographic artistic identity, Broodthaers's endless iteration of photographic copies of eagles and associated objects positioned his archive not in a logic of homogeneous unity but in a field of nonhierarchical heterogeneity. According to Rosalind Krauss, Broodthaers's gambit ushered in what she terms the post-medium Writing about Gerhard Richter's Atlas (1964-present), condition+" an open-ended compendium of photo-

graphic panels and tableaux initiated by the artist as a reflection on the relationship between the photographic and historiographic, Benjamin Buchloh implicitly recognizes that the principle of collectivization-an important function of museums and archives-has been integral to photography's disciplinary method from its inception. Projects such as Atlas, he notes, have "taken as the principles of a given work's formal organization photography's innate structural order (its condition as archive) in conjunction with its seemingly infinite multiplicity, capacity for serialization, and aspiration toward comprehensive totality ... "15 Buchloh casts doubt, however, on the historical coherence of such practices, labeling them "unclassifiable within the typology and terminology of avant-garde art history,"16and concluding that "the didactic and mnemonic tracing of historical processes, the establishment of typologies, chronologies, and temporal continuities ... have always seemed to conflict with the avant-garde's self-perception as providing instantaneous presence, shock, and perceptual rupture."!? Buchloh argues that Richter's Atlas inherited the conditions of this archival impasse:

Ever since he fashioned this ur-museum in a suitcase. "15 Buchloh casts doubt. Duchamp appeared to have been grappling with a dilemma. Projects such as Atlas. and perceptual rupture." to borrow an apt phrase from Foucault. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements. labeling them "unclassifiable within the typology and terminology of avant-garde art history. Department des Aigles (1968). tivization-an graphic panels and tableaux initiated by the artist as a reflection on the relationship between the phoBenjamin Buchloh implicitly recognizes that the principle of collecbeen integral to photography's disciimportant function of museums and archives-has
plinary method from its inception. organized and codified in an archival system cum mobile museum titled La bette-envalise (1935-41 ). images. chronologies. and aspiration toward totality ."!? Buchloh argues that Richter's Atlas inherited the conditions of this archival impasse:
. it
is fundamentally also about form and concept.. have always seemed to conflict with the avant-garde's self-perception as providing instantaneous presence. and at the same time creating the conditions for their organization and reception as an oeuvre and an archive. Broodthaers's endless iteration of photographic copies of eagles and associated objects positioned his archive not in a logic of homogeneous unity but in a field of nonhierarchical heterogeneity.t" Writing about Gerhard Richter's Atlas (1964-present). 11
I
La bolte-en-velise is not only a sly critique of the museum as institution and the artwork as artifact. he notes.. shock. tographic and historiographic. there has existed a fascination within art with the procedures of the museum as archive.l. Marcel Duchamp's miniaturization of his entire corpus into a deluxe edition of reproductions. on the historical coherence of such
practices.13 If the framework for
Duchamp's box is the myth of a coherent monographic artistic identity.r
II:
Enwezor 14
Archive as Form The photographic archive is one of the many ways in which archival production has been developed within the context of art. an open-ended compendium of photoBroodthaers's gambit ushered in what she terms the post-medium condition. as "it reveals the rules of a practice that enable statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. According to Rosalind Krauss. capacity for serialization. have "taken as the principles of a given work's formal organization photography's conjunction comprehensive innate structural order (its condition as archive) in with its seemingly infinite multiplicity. and temporal continuities .. however. but it remains one of the most rigorous."12 Decades Broodthaers later. By faithfully creating reproductions of his works that approximate photographic facsimiles. the establishment of typologies.'
0
as a site of
reflection on the prodigious output of historical artifacts.. such a system was amplified by Marcel in his Musee d'Art Moderne.9 is certainly not the first of such programmatic engagements of the work of art as archive."16 and concluding that "the didactic and mnemonic tracing of historical processes. one which placed his works "between tradition and oblivion. and the various taxonomies that govern their relationship to one another.

it is also true." which "must include the theory of . and in its presence it is unavoidable. the theory both of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it. historicity."22 The archive achieves its authority and quality of veracity. or a civilization cannot be described exhaustively: or even. classification. one whose methodological apparatus does not set "a condition of validity for judgements. The archive cannot be described in its totality. exists as a representational form of the ungainly dispersion and pictorial multiplicity of the photograph. its system of accumulation. and interpretive power-in short. that the archive of a society. and organized form of
How is the validity of statements posited in an archive to be judged? For Jacques Derrida.. the logic of Atlas is impeded by the impossibility of assigning a singular rationality to its existence as a unity: "Atlas hovers.V? the statements. According to Lynne Cooke. and annotation of knowledge and information could also be understood as a representative historical form. that is to say. The archive as a representation of the taxonomy. it is not possible for us to describe our own archive. "between the promise of taxonomic order as divulged in the archive and the total devastation of that promise . The archival structure defines what Derrida calls the principle of "domiciliation. as Foucault notes. but a condition of reality for statements. statements acquire legitimacy through "a science of the archive. defined as a field of archaeological inquiry. however encompassing representation may appear.
21
Whatever
its accumulated. It emerges in fragments. the ability to do so is often superceded by concerns governing the disjunction between systems and methods. the archive of a whole period. the descriptive terms and genres from the more specialized history of photography-all of them operative in one way or another in Richter's Atlas-appear equally inadequate to classify these image accumulations. at the same time. the discursive order of this photographic collection cannot be identified either with the private album of the amateur or with the cumulative projects of documentary photoqraphy. levels . indexed. Despite the first impression that the Atlas might give. as such. then. no doubt. the object of our discourse-its modes of appearance.. disappearance. since it is that which gives to what we can say-and to itself.!"
•
Inasmuch as any sensibility may wish to impose a restrictive order on the archive. tabulated."19
From the above we can establish that the archive is a compensation (in the psychoanalytic sense) of
11
the unwieldy. its evidentiary function. its reality-through a series of designs that unite structure by and function. On the other hand. its forms of existence and coexistence. diachronic state of photography and. since it is from within these rules that we speak." she writes.."
. a culture.. institutionalization.. regions. a journey through time and space. which Foucault designates as a historical a priori.Enwezor
16
Yet.
.

become and form a logic of domiciliation
consignation (gathering together signs that designate the artist's oeuvre). and Richter's Atlas correspond precisely to both Foucault's and Derrida's different takes on the archive. as well as a condition of reality of the statements of each of the individual works. wanted
. site maps. in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal confiquration."26 The very activity of consignation. Artists interrogate the self-evidentiary claims of the archive by reading it against the grain.!. the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign. the U.v' The archival form is fundamental to the archive's ability to create the "condition of validity of judgements" (Foucault) to be undertaken. "25 and so on. the process of domiciliation. the narrative it has to convey. this place where they dwell permanently . information. the a priori archive of the artist's practice. photographs of laboratories. consignation is to be understood in terms that "do not only mean. "aims to coordinate a single corpus. reams of paper. or it may result in the creation of another archival structure as a means of establishing an archaeological relationship to history. or the heterogeneity of Broodthaers's curatorial arrangement. bills of procurement.v'" The terms of reference for Duchamp's La boite-en-valise.. in a place and on a substrate. evidence. but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. Derrida calls this function "consiqnation. and data that will give rise to its own interpretive cateqories. "23 He compares this condition of existence. The scramble to find the weapons included a search through the Iraqi archives for documents containing evidence of a weapons system's many components: designs. Department des Aigles. of identification. The Iraqi administration presented the inspectors with volumes of documentation. of classification." the task through which the archive conducts "the functions of unification. This interrogation may take aim at the structural and functional principles underlying the use of the archival document. Broodthaers's Musee d'Art Moderne.
Enwezor
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which the institutional form is achieved. therefore.F?
Intelligence Failure I Archival Disappointment Permit me to recall an important moment in recent history: the frantic search for evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) undertaken by a coterie of United Nations investigators in the months leading up to the Iraq War in 2003. to a house arrest. in the ordinary sense of the word. building plans. to deposit). a mountain of information showing the initial attempts to constitute a weapons program and later efforts to dismantle the operational capacity to build an arsenal of future destruction. However. the archive as a physical entity is manifested in a concrete domain: "The dwelling.S.. The portable box in which Duchamp organized his then-extant works as reproductions. Such methods conform to what Hal Foster identifies as the "archival impulse"28 that suffuses current artistic practice. Meanwhile. or Richter's perpetual and commentary on photography as a mnemonic object.

imperial Britain was above all founded on the production of paper.S. as the organ through which we come to know what has been. to imperial ambition and Derrida's "science of the archive"-was knowledge and a reference in which to
was in this era that the impenetrable territory of Tibet-impenetrable. In the absence of reliable maps of the Himalayan territory. measure and examination to prepare data to be acted upon by the variable modalities of power. the burden of proving the negative rested on the other side. quantifiable. along with the systems organizing them and the rules for distributing their content. As Richards points out. author of The Imperial Archive. maps. and recognize the past.S. it attempted (without success) to bolster the moral imperative behind its threats to invade Iraq. It that is.to retain exclusive hermeneutic authority over any "intelligence": if the "intelligence" accorded with the U.P? The calculated manufacture of "intelligence" to fit the policy of Iraq's invasion disturbs the integrity of and confidence in the archive as a site of historical recall. if it contradicted those claims. the Royal Photographic Society. the British Museum. then it fulfilled and consolidated the Bush administration's claims. surveys. all of which spawned other documents. and tested knowledge (positive knowledge) into universal principles of aggregated data. Thomas Richards.33 With the establishment of institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society. that is to say.
mapped. the raw material constituting read. Of course. and
unable to send British surveyors into Tibet. the objectives of such unification were attended by ideological manipulation: "Unawares. the British India Survey resorted to an ingenious plan
. the archival gaze has combined the triple register of inquiry.s? As the Bush administration's "slam dunk"31 theory of an a priori indisputable fact-the existence of WMD-unraveled. intelligence. locates the origins of this archival impulse in nineteenth-century Victorian England. during the heyday of British imperialism. the idea of an empire that sees "intelligence" as the total mastery and domination of an adversary through its superior power of clairvoyance is not new. We now know the full extent of the fraudulence of U. who were all but accused of being agents of Iraqi disinformation. Although it was an empire of vast territories. The manipulation of evidence to justify war underscores the imperatives of modern intelligence gathering as a fundamental drive toward acquisition and control of information and comprehensive knowledge. Induced into a fever of knowledge accumulation and intelligence gathering. The process of archival synchronization and unification was accomplished by reconciling specific forms of discrete. We witnessed this catch-22 in relation to both the United Nations inspectors led by Hans Blix and the International Atomic Energy Agency officials. Victorian Britain initiated one of the most prodigious archive-making periods in modern history. taxonomies. patrolled by mighty naval fleets and army regiments. and British intelligence (truth) claims. verify. and the Colonial Office. classifications: the Western gaze-was images."34 Overseeing this immense accumulation of data-photographs. view. and images. the Victorian archival industry began a process whereby information concerning the known world was synchronized and unified. the imperial periscopic eye. assorted documents.

From the former he removed eight beads. For concealed in this. through exhaustive practice. but leaving a mathematically convenient 100. Constructing these "paradigms of knowledge . Mercury."35 actually a network of Hindu pundit spies from the Indian Himalayas.. This enabled them to measure immense distances with remarkable accuracy and without arousing suspicion."39
. "classified.Enwezor
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devised by one Major Thomas G. and submitted to tools of regulatory control. compiled detailed statistics and measurements of their journey. Thermometers. Beyond that. Every Buddhist carried a rosary of 108 beads on which to count his prayers. together with any other discreet observations.000 paces. The total for the day's march. disguised as Buddhist pilgrims traveling through Tibet. Each complete circuit of the rosary thus represented 10. was a roll of blank paper. the pundits. Both of these Montgomerie turned to his advantage. such knowledge had to be compiled. many of whom regularly crossed the passes to visit the holy sites of the ancient Silk Road. with its copper cylinder. "36 This arduous operation. in which archive making was subtended by the principles of espionage.. It was here that the prayer-wheel. proved invaluable. the details of the Tibet archive had been transformed into "classified" information "placed under the jurisdiction of the state. and also a small wood and metal prayer-wheel which he spun as he walked. Beginning around 1865. essential for setting an artificial horizon when taking sextant readings. Montgomerie. to take a pace of known length which would remain constant whether they walked uphill."3s By the turn of the century. for the Pundit was required to take regular bearings as he journeyed. which were needed for calculating altitudes.. Often they traveled as Buddhist pilgrims. At the hundredth pace the Pundit would automatically slip one bead. were hidden in the tops of the pilgrims' staves.. was hidden in cowrie shells . not enough to be noticed. Next he taught them ways of keeping a precise but discreet count of the number of such paces taken during a day's march. This served as a log-book. had somehow to be logged somewhere safe from prying eyes. a member of the Royal Engineers Corps: the survey and mapping of Tibet would be conducted with "native explorers..v'? unified. was undertaken in service to the empire's insatiable appetite for knowledge of the unknown. Peter Hopkirk traces this story of daring archival espionage that may equal Google Maps for its pinpoint precision: Montgomerie first trained his men.. which could easily be got at by removing the top of the cylinder . Then there was the problem of a compass. downhill or on the level. seemed to solve the problem of imperial control at a distance. Montgomerie decided to conceal this in the lid of the prayer-wheel. in place of the usual hand-written scroll of prayers.

Knowledge was equated with national security. towards the search for a new type of rationality and its various effects. are we not reminded of how deeply embedded the processes of archival production are in the modern state form? For the gathering and interpretation of intelligence-more principle of archival formation.S."41 Here we witness firsthand
. that became the paramount legacy of imperial archive making. In this story of archives and counter-archives. Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that a document obtained by British intelligence and in the possession of American officials showed indisputably that the Iraqi regime was actively seeking to buy "yellow cake" uranium from the African nation of Niger. Google Earth. accordingly the imperial archival system positioned "itself not as the supplement of power but as its replacement. The document supporting Powell's claim was soon revealed to be a forgery. sorting."? The archival construction of Tibet. an information society was created. This is the proper context in which to read the battle over archival information between the U.S. or describing images. though they surely do engage these practices. Let us recall another episode in that spectacle of archival disinformation: when then-U. the "great game" of imperial expansion was an acquisitive game of spatial dominance but one invested with the superior capacity to control the flow of information through the archive. and the Iraqi government arbitrated by the United Nations. But it was the foundational principle of the state's power to monopolize knowledge. The artists presented here are not concerned simply with accumulation. allows some aspects of its spatial modeling to be public while others are suppressed in the interest of national security. Throughout the nineteenth century. began as a work of map making and geography linked to espionage and intelligence gathering. accurately. and to excise from public view archive material it deemed too sensitive. the intimate knowledge gained of this closed society. data-are nothing more than the obsessive
Archive as Medium The artworks that comprise this exhibition represent some of the most challenging interpretive. interpreting. or knowledge is today a pervasive method of regulatory control of the archive. data. They are also motivated by a process described by Foucault as a "tracing-back to the original precursors. and probing examples of contemporary art's confrontation with and examination of the historical legacy of archival production. analytical. Richards cites Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim-a book ordered around the pursuit of power and authority-as an example of the obsession with correlating classified knowledge and national security. the "pure fantasy" of an intelligence agent.Classifying information. Tibet is but one of many examples of the attempt to construct an empire of archival knowledge as part of the regime of national security. for instance. From that. And this control over the flow of information is strengthened by other networks of archival manipulation or data generation.

were "even more variously active in the postwar period. archive and public information. we experience firsthand their effects. and artistic models become historicizing constructs. and the conceptual. and the informational structures of Conceptual art. archive and ethnog-
imagination into sites of testimony. curatorial. between documentation index and the archival attributes they establish between public and commentary. In the works.g. in the pinboard aesthetic of the Independent Group. the mode by which many came to know. especially as appropriated images and serial formats became common idioms (e. varied actions or performances of contemporary art that relied on the archival reproductions of the artistic event or action. and the ways in which they are arrayed before us. and much more inform and infuse the practices of con-
tion. This dispersal had ideological implications. As many historians have argued. and feminist art). information gathering. remediated representations from Robert Rauschenberg through Richard Prince. of master the projection of the social art. And it came to determine the status of the documentary apparatus. witnessing. critique and analysis. Archive Fever does not simply organize for the viewer the visual effects of the archival form or medium. archive and trauma. especially with regard to forms of propaganda. a world of practices staged as much for itself as for the carnera. power and subordinaand thus counter-narratives. Foster writes that the early modernist uses of the photographic and private. data-driven visual analysis. the invention of counter-archives temporary artists.. we are confronted with relationships between archive and memory. Nor is its central preoccupation with assessing the cleverness of the critiques of archival truth inherent in some of the examples presented here." Hal Foster elaborates on the long history of archivization as a structural mode of organizing the proliferating images of photographic media. the photofiles of Rodchenko and photomontages of Heartfield.P Without the photographic or filmic
L
. Taking us into the era of Richter's generation. archive and time. so that in the works. point to the resilience of the archive as both form and medium in contemporary raphy. The variety and range of archival methods and artistic forms. archive and identity. through documentation. the contradictions narratives. In his essay "An Archival Impulse. institutional critique.Enwezor
22
how archival legacies become transformed into aesthetic principles. the mediatory structures that underpin the artists' mnemonic strategies in their use of the archive. These are some of the issues this exhibition seeks to illuminate. for instance. The "archival impulse" has animated modern art since the invention of photography."42 These various modes of deploying appropriated images and using photographic documentation to inform the principle of the artwork were largely what gave rise to the conceptual system of archival photography. and temporal principles that each undertakes. The aim is not to produce a theory of the archive but to show the ways in which archival documents. the principle of the archival was anticipated by the regulative order of the photographic dispersal through mass media. Mass media enabled the public manipulation of photography. particularly in some of the formats of the early avant-garde in Russia and Germany between the world wars.

rather. or. Horsfield commenced one of the most sustained and unique artistic investigations around the governing relationship between photography and temporality. but the exhibition also extends beyond it. a fundamental question persists: it concerns the relationship between temporality and the
image.. and recombining of visual data in infinite calibrations of users and receivers. history is that which transforms documents into monuments=" Much of the photographic production of Craigie Horsfield exists in these splices of time and image. relations. he claims. this relationship is a prevalent one. such as the emblematic work of Robert Smithson. "46
Here. series. Durational pieces that rely on recording or documentation. are examples of this kind. In an illuminating passage. specifically to the industrial city of Krakow. an action and its archival photographic trace. taxonomic. Working with a large-format camera. theatrically antiheroic black-and-white photographs
. the condition of reality on which their received effect as works of art depended would not have existed. But this relationship between past event and its document. the photographic document is a replacement of the object or event. Hamish Fulton. the events of which only the trace remains. and lend speech to those traces which. Foucault captures the "burning desire" behind some of these types of archivization.record of events or performances. document and monument.Y"
Documents into Monuments: Archives as Meditations on Time45 The enumeration of these various archival registers. indexical. is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said. or which say in silence something other than what they actually say
. in some cases. In others. in which the formats of contemporary art address the urgency of visual information in the age of mechanical reproduction. Richard Long. then in the throes of industrial decline and labor agitation. sharing. is one of Archive Fever's referential sources.. The issue grappled with here is not so much the artist's employment of archival logic but. whose activities of inscription were only possible through the medium of photographic representation. and archaeological means by which artists derive and generate new historical as well as analytical readings of the archive. We are fundamentally concerned with the overlay of the iconographic. the artist's relationship to images or instruments of mass culture or media in which the archival is sought out-especially in the digital arena-as part of a broad culture of sampling.. rather. typological. in themselves. history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself unities. totalities. the physical work and its citations stand as two separate systems. There he began shooting a series of ponderous and. are often not verbal. transform them into documents. is not simply the act of citing a preexisting object or event. "The document . and Gabriel Orozco. he traveled to pre-Solidarity Poland. such as the work of Ana Mendieta. in which artists undertake to "'memorize' the monuments of the past. not merely a record of it.. so much so. According to Foucault. that "in our time. the object and its past. In the late 1970s.

exemplary of Horsfield's
careful. enveloping them in inky blackness. the caption indicates the exact date of its making. as if touching the sentient melancholy of the man and woman. August 1987 (1995) is. Here. or portraits of young men and women. is impossible to parse in Horsfield's method. the time of making functions as a shadow archive next to the flat panel of the large-scale print. slightly turned face. encompassing it and slowing it down. The scene is lit in such a way that the background literally dissolves around the sitters. His work is one of two examples-the graphs-unique. Krakow. Horsfield's photoat the break between temporalities. again. The image emits an eerie silence. Printed in large-scale format with tonal shifts between sharp but cool whites and velvety blacks. each staring so intently at the camera that it appears they were themselves witnesses to. The principle of photographic portraiture. the archival time of the image. tonal contrasts around the shadowed. deserted street scenes. Nawojki. and machinery. annotative as well as denotative employment of the photographic as the weight of time that presses upon the image. a passing age. and second. 48 Horsfield's work is engaged with a conscious temporal delay of the archive. he calls our attention to the importance of archival time in the consideration of the image. Horsfield insists on the viewer's ability to decipher the denotative aspect of the image as a literal archive of time. the depiction of the body. Horsfield. the time lag between photographing and printing is often protracted-sometimes years elapse before an image is conjured. rather than specimens of. they stand before us as the condemned. July 1984 (1990) is a haunting double portrait of a couple. manifest in the analogical conditions of the tactile. In so doing. empty factory floor. Well Street. Magda Mierwa and Leszek Mierwa-ul. As with many of Horsfield's photographs. a bearded man and a woman. a fact made clear in the captioning. East London.the forces of change.
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£. stubborn mien. the archival register of its reproduction. illustrating both a slice of time and its slow immensity.
l_
. as if the exposure is drawn out over many years. The second aspect of his production takes it further: it sketches the subtle time lag between the creation of the image and its realization a few years later. materialist photographic medium of film and the instantaneous quality of digital production. They are often active meditations on the very nature of time and how it acts on memory and experience. The difference. in this instance. defines the traditional imperative of Horsfield's approach to image making.Enwezor
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comprising portraits. other being Stan Douglas's Overture-presented uneditioned. whether of a lugubriously lit street corner or a solemn. the surrounding field is rendered in sharp. Even if not quite a longue duree.
1
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archival time and linear time. next to the year of its full realization as a work. workers and lovers. With their stern. unrepeatable-operate here that captures the archival between potential of photographic technology as fundamentally an archaeology of time. along with a whole category of people SOonto be swept away by. The artist worked as if he were bearing witness to the slow declension of an era. In this rich black-and-white print of a reclining female nude. The disjunction between the instant in which the image is recorded and the moment it is finally printed produces two instances of the archive: first. these images underline the stark fact of the subject.

and human time. the filmic narrative appears seamless. of time passing as a moving image. nature and cul-
other projects. Douglas's Overture emphasizes cyclical temporality. showing instead "its rhythmic. predigital photography of noninstantaneous reproduction that allows the image to gel in the artist's own consciousness long before
meditation on the very logic of time as it bears on the question of history and identity. transforming the filmic space into a closed circuit" less rotation is not merely a technical representation Scott Watson argues that this endof time. in an experience of time-depth and repetition.At the same time. and the passage from Proust is incorporated as six separate segments. a coordination of space and time. as a juncture between past and present. hypnotic effects on the viewer. rather. In contrast to Horsfield's photographic projects. output comprising tens of thousands of
. only to emerge on the other end where the manipulated editing posits a steady continuation. (2002) belongs to this temporal category in which the archive is used to elicit the boundless procession of discrete levels of time. the loop allows the experience of the film to occur as an endless revolution of image and time. To explore the theme of temporality as it structures experience and consciousness. the looping device becomes the means by which a confluence occurs between "mechanical time. according to his mode of working. which is known through memory. Though the film is stitched together in three sections.t? Stan Douglas's Overture (1986) is similarly concerned with the relationship of archive and time. shot in 1901. 16mm film that stitches together two separate footages shot by the film division of the Edison Company in the Canadian Rockies: one shows Kicking Horse Canyon. the establishing shot of the first sequence becomes the anchor for the circularity of the loop to suggest nonlinear temporality. By deploying a looping mechanism. a mode that Douglas has explored in is contemporaneous Douglas employs an audio track of recited passages from Marcel Proust's insomniac novel. the other White Pass in British Columbia. new technology does not permit us to do just what he has been so adept at accomplishing-a it emerges from its glacial substrate. ture. The break in linearity that is crucial to Douglas's proposal delinks the film from its narrative construction. Overture is a looped. "53 Jef Geys's work Day and Night and Day and . Through this continuation. positivism and romanticism. which are constituted around perceptual breaks in linear time. through two rotations."52 The careful calibration of mechanical and mnemonic temporality begins at the first emergence of the film as a self-consciously driven operation through the camera's sweeping views of the landscape up to the point where the train carrying it plunges into the blankness of the tunnel. suturing breaks in time and images.5o That Proust's book about time and its disappearance Company's film is not coincidental. It is both a personal and cultural meditation on time and the archive.. In Search of Lost with the Edison since Douglas has carefully synchronized text and image as a kind of old-fashioned. which proceeds through repetition. as a narration. Geys's work provokes an interaction with the archive as a chronotope-that Constituted out of more than forty years of photographic is. shot in 1899.. Time.

Unlike Richter's Atlas. as the through sheer density. gradations of muted gray and lightness. 54 Building on archival analyses of visual history. artists have turned to the photographic archive in order to generate new ways of thinking through historical events and to transform the traditional ideas surrounding the status of the photographic document.. The uses to which Warhol subjected the archive of mass media have engendered and encoded some of the most sustained reflexive accounts on photographs as an incunabulum of public memory. car crashes. rather. Geys's work is not one of accumulation and collecting. it is an inventory of ephemeral images. Warhol grasped the potential of such images as a means of plumbing the psychic ruptures in the American collective imaginary. The basic means of this proto-cinematic work belie the conceptual nature of its in the monologue to Douglas's Overture-of relentless inscription of private memory onto the space of a collective public culture. and traumas of the American self. in almost chronological register. Warhol's images culled from media reports of misfortune and privation (suicides. as a speculum for examining the violence. 1963)-considerations
of the relationship between documentary information converge
with aspects of witnessing and collective memory. Nothing much happens in the film apart from shifts in tone. electric chairs. oftentimes generated in the media-as is the case with
Race Riot (ca. and next. slowly and arduously exposed one frame followed by the next. the thirty-six-hour film is not only structurally about the flow of images from a time past into the present. unfolding one panel at a time. makes the case for Warhol as a history
painter. Anne Wagner. Though seemingly interested in celebrity and media spectacle. Working with the basic format of an inventory.P" what Wagner calls the "registration of the glamour and redundancy and immanent violence of American life under late capitalism. the form of its delivery is also intended to confound the ability to distill the film into an index of a life's work. Few have matched Andy Warhol's profound reflections on photography's morbid hold on the modern imagination. as the images unspool in a horizontal band. by virtue of its languorous movement.P"
Warhol's Race Riot is emblematic of the connection between archive and trauma.
Archive and Public Memory For nearly a century. tragedies. racist police officers and vicious dogs) delineate a grid of social lives. artists have interrogated the status of the photographic archive as a historical site that exists between evidence and document. In recent years. in a masterful reading of Warhol's paintings and prints made from a photo-essay by Charles Moore initially published in Life. the photographs are activated as moving pictures by slow dissolves.Enwezor
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images taken by the artist from the late 1950s to 2002.v'" But the trauma explicated in Race Riot is of a different order than that found in the
l
. public memory and private history. endless pursuit-as The temporal relationship between each image is established history as the passage of time.. day and night and day .

Like Warhol. a wound is exposed as the sign of a shocking collective trauma. Gonzalez-Torres addresses a peculiarly American issue." Wagner observes."59 If Race Riot allegorizes a peculiarly midcentury American crisis. and therefore Untitled oscillates between document and monument. One can also argue that the second effect of the work. here subtly transformed from mere representation to a kind of altarpiece. In this collation of obituaries. is a reversal of the first. It is a token of
remembrance and a work of mourning. as a literal archive. "The result. 1989. Alternating between document and monument. "is images caught between modes of representation: stranded somewhere between allegory and history. The photographs are organized on the white sheet of paper in no apparent order or hierarchical arrangement.58 The latter embody a kind of popular grotesque. First. gender. impaled on electrical poles on dark American highways and suburban fodder for the entertainment industry. Yet this work differs from Warhol's in a crucial respect. Lieberman's use of newspaper photographs of the missing children alerts us to the wide-ranging deployment of the photographic portrait as an index of memory. or circumstance of death (suicides and homicides). from May 1 to May 7. across the cities of America."? Like all of the artist's stacked offset pieces. such a crisis constitutes the sociological ground for the glossary of images in Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990). with numbing silence-transforms its structure from archival printed sheet to sculptural monument. the scenes of death and their various archival returns become part of everyday spectacle. This running tally illuminates the images within the reportorial or documentary boundary specific to the account of each victim. as an image of identification and
. Gonzalez-Torres's archive of random deaths memorializes the victims. The work's somber content-images of the dead stare back at the viewer. The democracy of death is spotlighted here. Nino Perdido functions as a kind of pre-obituary for the lost who may never be found. llan Lieberman also enlists the archive as a form of commemoration in Nino Perdido (2006-7). trapped in burning cars. information and photography. class. shifting from the archival to the monumental and from that to the documentary. without regard for race. the seeming randomness of relationships between victims coalesces into a unity through the time frame of their deaths. a fascination with a cartoon ish kind of horror in which the victims-smashed streets-become against windshields.Enwezor
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luridly sensationalist images of the Saturday Disasters series. If Race Riot represents the monumentalization of the document as his-
tory painting. a series of drawings based on photographs of missing children whose disappearances were reported in local Mexican newspapers. an index of grainy black-and-white photographs of 464 people who died from gunshots during a oneweek period. it embodies Foucault's idea of the document turned into a monument. irrespective of victim. age. The allusive character of this extraordinary but deceptive work operates at the level of two kinds of archival practice. Untitled consists of several hundred sheets of printed paper endlessly available for viewers to take away and endlessly replenished to maintain an ideal height. Revisiting traumatic violence in this way.

Front Page. Have the images become emblematic more of the aftermath than of the event itself? How does one revisit. and second. not the event itself. in newspapers and magazines. The destruction of the World Trade Towers in Lower Manhattan instantly transformed the site into a memorial and monument. These are questions we must grapple with in Hans-Peter Feldmann's new project. private and public. he has been concerned. To broach the event that spawned so many iconic images is to touch a living wound. the artful and kitsch. As the circulation of these images continues unabated. to lapse into cheap vulgarity. regulated format in which he recalimages into new structures of interpretation.
In each carefully drawn image. compels a different register of ethical and political disclosures. Ground Zero became a shrine and a sacred ground. and continue to be replayed every anniversary. 2001. but its aftermath. he has painstakingly recreated the exact
pictorial format of the original newspaper image. and the evacuation of meaning that ensued as photographic images became empty signs. Mixing the high and low. first. Do the fluttering sheets of newspaper illuminate the dark events of September 11. to experience the vividness with which its memory still reverberates around the world. mined by the gravity of the subjects he engages-such dealing with images of terrorism in Germany-and ibrates his collected or produced photographic "anti-photoqraphic'P? approach is underas in Die Toten. an installation (presented here for the first time) documenting the media response to September 11 through a collection (an archive) of some 100 front pages of European and other international newspapers published on September 12. seven years after the fact? This is Feldmann's provocation. 11 created a new iconomy+' a vast economy of the iconic linking archive to traumatic
public memory. The breaching of the two towers by the force of the exploding planes created an indelible iconography of the massive structures burning and collapsing. a day after the horrors unfolded. its mediatized manifestation? For many. Feldmann's seemingly offhanded. a work 9/12
the systematic. Does seeing the events from distant shores change its fundamental impact or its political and collective meaning in America? And what about showing these front pages in the very city where the carnage happened. anti-aesthetic. 1967-1993 (1998).sometimes disidentification. Since then. artistically. The traumatic images became archival the instant the first footage September surfaced and the need for documentary accounts grew. 9/12 Front Page (2001). on television and the Internet. with numbing repetition. It is difficult to come to terms. with the disjuncture between the ubiquity of the photographic image as it developed a private cult of commemoration. with the events of September 11. as if also creating a memorial to the lost child. Feldmann abandoned painting in the late 1960s to focus exclusively on the photographic medium. The images were instantly broadcast across the world.2001. to say more with images of September 11 is already to say too much. or do they banalize and ultimately diminish their projected impact? Is September 11 principally a media event for the global pub-
. it is fair to ask what their status is beyond their initial documentary purpose as evidence of two incomprehensible acts of violence. with photography's social and political meaning in the context of public culture. like Die Toten.

[Corpse of mother at Bergen-Belsen). for instance.. the general takes precedence over the specific. [they] have no way of distinguishing between criminals and victims. building on the anonymity of individual lives to illuminate a kind of generalized singularity. the configuration of the images and their dilated. soft-focus pictorialism produce an unsettling ambiguity. Again. for one never knows what is properly historical or semantically archival. however. Here. monumental. thus calling attention to issues of their authenticity as historical documents). women. is treated through the structural mechanism by which we come to experience the transformation of private images-snapshots disappearance and recall-into of men. it is impossible to tell whether in this gallery of individual lives the images are genuine historical documents or merely images that stand in for such individuals. London
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. but one nonetheless subordinated to the discourse of a group. .Enwezor
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excess. The sequence of images.
"65
In Lessons of
Darkness: Archives: Detective (1987). This is the essence of Boltanski's ambivalence. but while the "spectators of the work know that these photographs are images of individuals involved in crime and murder. Artistic assessments of photographic and media documents have contributed to reconsiderations as evidence of archival artifacts to broader connected
inquiries into the theme of public memory. 1945 IWM negative #BU 4027
Printed with the permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum. These inquiries have in turn inspired critical appraisals by contemporary artists of the genealogy and history of archival practices. children hovering between powerful.. As the fascination
Photographer
unknown. Given Boltanski's propensity to mix the fictional and the documentary. April 17. a community. which alludes to the Holocaust. the collectivized arrangements take precedence over the singular and unique. Detective appropriates the norms of the photographic such as juxtaposition and decontextualization
montage. a mode in which devices
interrupt the regularized flow of pictorial narrative but
which also privilege a democracy of relationships over the specificity of the sign. or Archive Dead Swiss (1990). collated from a variety of sources (sometimes the same images are reused in other ways. dealing with crime. suggests such relationships. linear arrangements that become meditations
on public memory. The collectivized archive becomes a mnemonic reflection on history.P'' The darkness of the Holocaust.

so as to fill the frame in a looming. Further interventions include an elaborately carved frame. there are philosophical and political interests at work. a straight line to that site in which the body of the young mother was photographed? Projected back into historical consciousness through the daring reconstitution of a documentary photograph. and splashedwith almost expressionistic verve-with a blue-purple selenium tint that gives it the jarring. and cultural speculation. toward the end of World War II. projective fashion. the difference between a purely semantic reading of the archive and its properly situated historical present. as a counter-archive to bureaucratically generated amnesia about the Iraq War." as Toby Haggith argues. Alabama. political. While the Abu Ghraib images have served an instrumental purpose in a public controversy. However. What was Morris attempting to convey through the juxtaposition of the transformed photograph and the sculpturelike frame? Does this decontextualization forty years after the event enhance our understanding of that event? Or does it rupture linear mnemonic continuity. Morris explicitly references a historical event. fabricated from a material called Hydrocal used by Morris in the 1980s in a "'baroque' phase of firestorm and holocaust paintings. emaciated body of a young mother partially covered around the chest by a torn blanket. This photograph and many other documentations of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen provide vivid accounts of unimaginable horror. One is a documentary photograph shot on April 17. a subject recorded by photographers and writers. It shows the splayed. in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by a member of the British Army's Film and Photographic Unit. torture. her eyes fixed in the contortions of death. treated with encaustic."69 Their wide public dissemination heightened their impact and no doubt contributed to the fascination with their iconography. Archives represent scenes of unbearable historical weight and therefore open up a productive space for artists in the form of aesthetic." Morris (again like Warhol) made some alterations to the original Bergen-Belsen image: it has been cropped. such as the Holocaust or the firebombing of German cities like Dresden. is that they "are some of the most grotesque and disturbing. artistic interventions can activate more complex reflections on the relationship between the photographic document and historical consciousness. Morris's work derives its power
. Untitled (1987). The image offered for comparison. then.I
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with the images of the Abu Ghraib scandal shows. We need to reckon with. suggesting a reliquary. is by Robert Morris. discordant appearance of an Old Master print.68 One reason these images have remained lithe most influential of any record or artefact documenting the Nazi concentra-
~-
tion camps. Untitled is part of a body of work in which he reconsiders images associated with World War II."? Like Warhol's use of Charles Moore's photographs of the Civil Rights march in Birmingham. social. a silkscreen version of the Bergen-Belsen photograph. and abuse. placed side by side. 1945. there is a more profound antagonism toward the status of such images in venues of art."72 Close inspection of the carved frame reveals fragments of human body parts and objects.P? Consider two photographic images. ethical.

in English. German. The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem."76 In a review of the film. Mitchell's illuminating reading
moves Morris's meditation on atrocity far from Finkelstein's critique by spelling out the temporal relationship between frame and image: the "hydrocal frames with their imprinted body parts and postholocaust detritus stand as the framing 'present' of the works. Sivan restructures the chronology of the trial. and French with English subtitles. Courtesy the artist
the disputed claim made by Norman Finkelstein that images of the atrocity have been manipulated as part of a process he calls the Holocaust industry?73 W. Morris does not directly engage Bergen-Belsen but. rather. the catastrophe that left the fossils as the imprints in which it is enframed.75 Sivan's film establishes a distance from the traumatic emotional responses that images of the Holocaust usually elicit. particularly among survivors. It focuses instead on the ordinariness of perpetrators like Eichmann. Hebrew. 1999 Video. color. who coordinated the efficient deportation of Jews on a mass scale to various death camps during the war. The Specialist is an intervention not only into the archive itself but also into the historical process of the trial. Frame is to image as body is to the destructive element. or to
Eyal Sivan. 128 min.:~
II
. J. such that the "distorted chronology occurs not only at the level of entire scenes but also on the editorial scale within the scenels]."?" The struggle between prosecutor and defendant-the
! \
/
court. comprised entirely of footage shot during the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of the notorious Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann.
survivors. Gal Raz notes that "Sivan uses cinematic-linguistic tactics of deconstruction and reconstruction to give Arendt's claims a filmic articulation. whose very innocuousness would lead the philosopher Hannah Arendt to coin the memorable phrase "the banality of evil. Does his engagement with this image owe to a broader enchantment with atrocity. as present is to past."?" Wielding the sharp knife of deconstruction. trophies or relics encrusted around the past event. The filmmaker's reshaping of the event through a series of editing choices lends drama to the otherwise laborious process of a judicial proceeding."?" Nazi atrocity is also the subject of Eyal Sivan's film The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1999). its archive. What frustrates the reading of Morris's work is not its deliberate aesthetic recomposition and decontextualization but the insistent location of the image within its historically troubled context.
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not merely from its subject-Nazi
barbarity-but
in
the way it establishes a heightened sense of ambivalence in an image that is an almost sacred manifestation of archival specificity. and the State of Israel pitted against Eichmann and the entire Nazi death apparatus-viti-
I
t.. presenting it out of sequence and thus denying the logic of archival linearity and narrative continuity. T. According to Raz.

Viewers become immersed in the sparring. films. The fascination with the archive. the inimitable madness of the archive. suggest not only a profound interest in the nature of the archival form found in photography and film but art's relationship to historical reflections on the past. political. Morris deploys an image that for many shocks and wounds memory.
. contemporary art's active interpellation of history and document as a way of working through the difficult zone between trauma and memory. and source. seems also to be a critical device for challenging contemporary culture's attentiveness to historical events. as all attention is fixed on Eichmann the beast. drawn from the archival index of horror. the constant return to it for verification. and cultural relationships to information. along with the power that archives exert on public memory. the war criminal and Jew hater. its social incommunicability as the rational voice of truth. inspiration. etc. Here photographs serve as more than repre-
sentations of the catastrophe. whether its images are lifted from newspapers and magazines or downloaded from digital cameras."? At issue here is how the works of Sivan and Morris offend the categorical power of the archive as the principal insight into a truth. Sivan interrogates the moral certainty of a judicial trial that connects the defendant to the atrocities from which Morris's image stems. Showing the prostrate figure of the woman lying in a field of what appears to be an aqueous liquid. has been condemned for minimizing the testimony of witnesses through his editorial decontextualization. posing instead the question of whether the Holocaust is representable without humanizing the perpetrators.. and memory. as if recently exhumed or in the process of submersion. To refute the singular authority of the archive is also ostensibly to diminish the trauma that it represents. narratives. Both projects draw from that vast iconomy of images to which the archive belongs. history. even secondary. museums. Memories of the Holocaust have been passed down to us in a steady stream of testimonies. rituals of witnessing. it presses upon its users and viewers new kinds of ethical. rather. Morris and Sivan's separate interventions are jarring because they seek to examine this troubled zone. between accused and accusers as they confront each other with accusations and denials of responsibility. In fact. like Arendt. if only to expose the archive's muteness. who concluded that Eichmann was a common criminal rather than an antisemite. has been largely visual. The footage of the trial conveys the obverse of evil incarnate. punctuated by gripping climaxes. at least for the general public. in the dramatic turns of the trial. Morris's decontextualization of the Bergen-Belsen image and Sivan's out-of-sequence chronology of the Eichmann trial fracture the concordance of archival truth to historical event and the sensational account which documentary photography gives it in relationship to memory. or. Sivan. the horror becomes muted. Morris's modified image. social. suggests a selfconscious ambiguity.ates any insight into the horror of the camps.sO All these
considerations are part of the activity of artists insofar as the archival impulse has become a commonplace in contemporary art. they have come to be seen as unmediated evidence of it. On this question. but the principal knowledge of it. So thoroughly has the archive been domesticated that it has come to serve as a shorthand for memory.

Against the edicts of forgetting. Raad / The Atlas Group direct us to the contradictions in the historical record and the methods that serve its varied accounts. Joreige instead asked each of her subjects to select an object that represents for him or her a memory of the war and to speak about its importance. But it also articulates a kind of punctum in that reflection. between generations and genealogies of images. It shows the diverse approaches. in which to reconsider the status of the archive. for another a drawing of a house plan. represents a turn toward abstraction as a strategy. those who-the captions tell us. and of defiance of the events that threaten to swallow up the individual's memories of loved ones. The hands reach out. based on the testimony of their beloved-have been martyred. Fakhouri's notebooks were "donated" to the Atlas Group Archive upon his death in 1993. and fantasmic invention. Sheikh's photographs of hands holding tiny passport images of lost or dead family members hover in the gray zone between remembrance and commemoration. as if to touch us with a searing memory. consists of 225 notebooks and other "evidence" compiled by the wholly imaginary Lebanese historian Dr. even-as this exhibition demonstrates-a vehicle for reconstituting history as self-conscious fiction. Here the nearly illegible written "evidence" culled from a fictive carbombing investigation floats in a sea of white topped by horizontal bands of enigmatic image fragments.P ' Pushed in other directions. witnesses. in gestures of affection that are nonetheless marked by the daunting affliction of death. The Fad! Fakhouri Fi!e. its history is a minefield of interpretation. who seem to have been irretrievably lost but must be constantly remembered as emblems of injustice. the traversed historical grounds. Fazal Sheikh's photographs from the series The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan (1997) push the archive toward an incommensurable zone of unbearable loss. While the Lebanese civil war may have been real. Borrowing the conventions of the historical novel. the archival form can become a temporal mechanism for enacting historical events. subjected to constant manipulation by ideological and sectarian forces. For one subject.Enwezor
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This exhibition is manifestly a conversation about such reflections. Such is the case of Walid Raad and The Atlas Group. Lamia Joreige explores the impact of the same war on Lebanese memories in her video Objects of War (1999-2006). the Atlas Group Archive deploys fictional characters-historians.82 for instance. The hands extend to the viewer images of sons and brothers. included in this exhibition. Rather than focus on images from photo albums. The objects trigger a deep archival
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. for yet another a large blue plastic vessel. Fakhouri of the thousands of car bombs detonated in Beirut during the war. We can make rain. interpreters. and archivistswhose investigations and commentary illuminate the disputed terrain of the war's recollections. and martyrdom. but no one came to ask (2008). whose ultimate hermeneutic value will in any case be disputed by different factions. Rather than draw us into an official documentary account. wounding humor. nobility. whose ongoing inquiry into Lebanon's civil war of the 1970s to 1990s is a work of deep perplexity. the representative object is an old group photograph. Yet it remains a site of vigilance. between modes of address and methods.

he takes the film back to Paris and proceeds to restore it.retrieval. Even more startling is a scene of his mother delivering a speech to a Communist Party congress held in Albania in the
. All these rituals of archival retrieval and performance have been a prominent feature of Eastern European societies since the fall of communism. Several years after the end of communism. testimonies of victims are heroically recast. the opening of the vast archives of the Stasi. In the former East Germany. Albania's communist leader whose distrust of the West led him to literally seal the country off from the rest of the world. In Poland. Diaries are published. formerly prohibited images emerge from the cellar. attempts to recapture orders of normality that predate the shock of historical rupture and the loss of access to the archive. in which the archive is perversely activated as a tool of disremembering in the service of official paranoia. Joreige's method elicits very personal testimonies that operate at the level of object relations and. has come under suspicion as a collaborator. precipitated a prolonged period of melancholic reflection and bitter controversy. the right-wing government led by the Kaczynski brothers has taken a sinister. while manifestly political. constitute archival fascism. Anri Sala's video Intervista (1998) begins like a detective story. and. Sala examines the negative by hand and discovers images of his mother at about the age of thirty. pseudo-legal approach to the past through the so-called law of lustration. A heightened sense of urgency surrounds the demand to remember and commemorate in societies where social codes of communication have been historically unstable or preempted by state repression. These official attacks. attics are rummaged. for instance. exercises in mass melancholy. former president of Poland and leader of Solidarity during the dissident rebellions of the late 1970s. all of which deal with the collapse of the communist imperium and the archival legacy of that seismic break with the past. Sala. reveal a layer of lived experience that confounds official accounts of the war's history. In their home. His curiosity piqued. boxes unburied. and Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas. returns to Tirana to visit his parents. the state secret police. he finds an unprocessed 16mm film in plastic wrapping. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica. a young Albanian art student studying in Paris. This is the exact opposite of the projects of Anri Sala. when liberated from these conditions.
Homo Sovieticus: Postcommunist Archives Archival returns are often conjoined with the struggle against amnesia and anomie. The film dates to the communist era but neither of his parents can recall its contents or the circumstances of its making. To his surprise. Such conditions can produce tendencies to the excessive collectivization of memory. an attempt to purge Poland's historical memory and political landscape of the taint of communist collaboration as well as undermine the moral position of the Kaczynskis' political adversaries. With no access to a film projector. he discovers footage of his mother meeting Enver Hoxa. Even Lech Walesa. dissident films surface.

The artists explain: Most of these films were produced in the ideological currents belonging to the Soviet period. between self and other. Sala employs lip readers from an Albanian school for the deaf to decipher his mother's speech and therefore provide the film with a more complete narrative. The speech. between image and memory. deconstruct the patriarchal structure of
communist society and." from product to state-ot-beinq. Once this is accomplished. on the other. This recursive interaction stages Intervista as an archive existing alongside a running commentary on its status as a historical object. The reconstituted footage is then supplemented with videotaped conversations between Sala and his mother.P"
To read this transaction. although it dictates the life of its own laws. he splices together the multiple frames of the original footage with subtitles. On another level. the film archive frames an interrogation of the very conditions inherent in the reception of Soviet ideology and the subordination of what was deemed "Lithuanianess. one taken up in a more archaeological fashion by the Lithuanian artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas. a shifting of temporal and historical positions between the communist past and the politically ambiguous present.Enwezor
38
1970s. who is now compelled to shift from the private world of familial affection to the arena of public confession. between muteness and language. Lithuanian feminist intel-
employed by the artists to." The project began with an examination of more than fifty Lithuanian films made between 1947 and 1997. the back-and-forth also occurs between conditions of archival production and historical reception. social. artist and mother. In their multipart work Transaction (2002). during the period of Soviet control of the cinematic apparatus. explore the purported "authenticity" of the Lithuanian feminine
. as the place to examine accounts of collective memory. filmic image and its historical meaning. as the film's sound reel is missing. and the audience applause. there is the question today as to what could have been "authentic. The resulting video alternates between the black-and-white archival footage and the color video interviews. on the one hand. Lenin's slogan on cinema as "of utmost importance of all the arts" was furthered by Stalin's statement: "cinema is illusion." Having lived in a single-ideology-based mass culture that scripted the space of the
homo Sovieticus.These relays and contextual changes impose a heavy burden on Sala's task as a filmmaker. and implicitly its testimony. Will this fortuitous discovery unlock the secret of Albania's communist past for the artist? Determined to reconnect the visual archive to its proper temporal context. are inaudible. a number of interlocutors-in lectuals-were this case. and ideological pressures that young men and women of his mother's generation endured in a closed system? These questions give the archive a new kind of interpretive structure. as it were. Is the mother to be judged as a collaborationist or a patriot? Can an intervention into the historical past such as Sala's video adequately convey the complexity of the political.

with every Romanian a participant in the spectacle. it appears that the revolution is literally broadcast live. although communism has disappeared from the political culture of Lithuania. recording represented one of the most astute critiques and dissections of the media spectacle in relation to radical expressions of political subjectivity.
The Ethnographic Conditions of the Archive The assumption that archival forms have specific mnemonic functions and hold a key to the door of historical experience also pertains to what may be designated as the archive's ethnographic condi-
. avant-garde African American musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron proclaimed: the "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. captured on camera and included in Videograms. Fusing all of these modes of multiple voicing and subject position. Farocki and Ujica use the archive to rework the relationship between power and popular forms of representation in a mode that moves beyond spectacle and elaboinstead utilizes the expressive instruments of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the camivalesqueP'' national allegory. the gathered revolutionaries declared: "We are victorious! The TV is with us. The result is a film that harks back to Sergei Eisenstein's October (1927). and the radical political projects of American countercultures. Twenty years later.voice. Videograms of a Revolution (1993) not only refutes conventional models of media critique and theories of spectacle. In a 1970 recording. critical dialog ism. it exploits the techniques of spectacle as a tool with which to construct and view history. both as a means of excavating the communist past and of building a post-Soviet. Videograms is structured with the same methods of editing and montage used by Eisenstein to transform the events of the 191 7 Russian Revolution into a film that expresses the subjectivity of popular sentiment." And so it was. Videograms is a montage drawn from 125 hours of amateur and professional archival video footage shot during the ten days of the Romanian Revolution. Intercutting professional footage. the artists point to a conundrum of the Soviet legacy and contemporary Lithuanian ambivalence that must remain a vital aspect of the assessment of the films. and raw data recorded by amateurs camped out on the streets. its social
rating forms of theatrical heteroglossia. Farocki and Ujica offer a penetrating insight into the televised revolution as an example of intertextual filmmaking. Moving back and forth between the old film archives and their translation into the present. the filmmakers Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica stood that formulation on its head."84 Released at the height of the Vietnam War. postcommunist and cultural repercussions remain. This dialectic directs our attention to the fact that. the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. As the film oscillates between television anchors reporting the shifting and indeterminate events. At a pivotal moment in the uprising. and sweeping views of crowds marching through the streets and battling security forces. television studio broadcasts. the grotesque.

as Terry Smith's neologism describes it. and ethnography. the so-called de-skilling of the photographic in contemporary art is not at issue here. maddening attention to the archive that this exhibition derives its operating set of idioms. on computer hard drives. an iconomy. pictures of objects. It is from this sense of the feverish. Since the mid-1980s. This economy of icons. vacation shots. The archive today rests in a state of historical incarceration. in historical reenactments. as popular entertainment. Vivan Sundaram. in private albums. Andreas Gursky. these images were carefully selected and resourced for the specificity of their cultural meanings. images. these artists have devoted their practice to explor-
. Dean uses Floh to demonstrate the logic of the "artist as ethnoqrapher. Wielding a sophisticated curatorial acumen. They are what Mark Godfrey calls "species of found photography. artists enact the archival fantasy as well as the archontic'" function of the historian. Archives constitute an economy of production. and Thomas Struth. and specifically ethnographic in nature. and transmission of images. Or. Each of these projects is concerned with the status of images as materials of cultural transaction and exchange. and signs exists in a murky sensorium. Be it the scripted spaces of homo Sovieticus or the drive toward the amassment of snapshots. Glenn Ligon. Sherrie Levine. Derrida's designation for this ethnographic condition is archive fever. Lorna Simpson. as monuments and memorials. This field of production might be described."9o However. domestic photography allows us to see the archive as a site where society and its habits are given shape. played out in media experiences. These functions also include the compulsive hoardings and accumulations that defy the temporal legibility around which certain archival projects. museums of art. the 163 images that comprise Floh can be generally categorized as amateur rather than professional photography. in the manner of Pierre Bourdieu. Accumulated over a period of seven years from secondhand bins in flea markets across Europe and the United States. pedagogue. curator. though "found" in the conventional sense. Thomas Ruff. Though the line between amateur and "fine art" photography is indeed blurred. the other members of this group are Candida Hofer. translator. as much as for their typological differentiations between image species. and Tacita Dean operate around the conditions of visual ethnography. blanketing the social and cultural landscape. are organized. Under this condition. snapshots of pets or family.P" in memorabilia concessions. especially as each of the works formulates a temporal and iconographic assessment of the archival past. They are consistent with types of images common to most domestic photographic production: portraits of individuals and groups (some quasi-institutional). in old libraries.91the concerns of this accumulated cache are fundamentally cultural. natural history.Enwezor
40
tion. such as that of Jef Geys.r'" Thomas Ruff belongs to that small group of German artists whose systematic rethinking of the photographic image emerged from the master classes of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Dusseldorf Academy beginning in the late 1970s. exchange. The projects of Zoe Leonard. as a cultural habitus."? an ethnographic condition. Tacita Dean's Floh (2000)B9 lends ethnographic insight into the production of domestic photography.

Ruff intervenes in the archive. reductive documentary sensibility and ethnographic subject matter. gathered from the detritus of the photographic economy.
"94
This shift in context. despite their variety. as they provide a glimpse into a distant industrial past. and.. it is in this juncture between decontexualization and fetishization that Ruff's Machines most resemble his teachers' blast furnaces. embedded in the archive. advertising photography) . direct.P'' the idea that race is literally inscribed on the skin. cropping. obtained by acquiring the photographic archives of Rohde und Dorrenberq. and the forensic. unmediated recording of objects was given a serial. conceptual rigor in the Bechers' photographs of flat. his concerns have shifted to photography's socially embedded contexts. Recently. in other words. a defunct machine and tool company that operated in Dusseldorf-Oberkassel. They have become iconic markers of industrial fetishization. the way such marking is reproduced and documented in social and cultural practices
. and mine shafts. enlarging. To this aesthetic Ruff's generation responded with images that. the theoretical and conceptual horizon of her complex examination of race and identity takes on two concomitant structures of archivization: on the one hand.ing new formats for conceptual approaches to image making. The language of her pictorial analysis always seems to play out in the interstices of the historical and psychic constitution of the black subject. As such. on the other hand. Of the Bechers' former students. Ruff enhances their photographic presence. and seemingly unmediated subjectivity of the Bechers' work. and the corresponding aesthetic and social meanings. and generating significantly larger prints than were initially produced for the brochure of the company's product line.. coloring. all of whom have developed their own critical language. the archival. unmodulated images of industrial structures on the verge of obsolescence. from product brochure to art photography. as well as endowing it with epistemological and aesthetic functions. Ruff invests the machines with a totemic presence. Ruff's approach to photography is the most heterogeneous. the manner in which the body of the black subject is culturally marked through the process of what Frantz Fanon terms epidermalization. Caroline Flosdorff observes that "the context in which Ruff's photographs are now shown is no longer bound to a particular objective (product photography. such as picture files drawn from Internet pornographic sites from which Ruff produced his Nudes series. grain silos. Like Dean's Floh. The machines lose all specificity as objects of ethnographic fascination. Machines (2003) continues Ruff's interest in investigating the cultural values. The idea of direct. Lorna Simpson's layered works encompass the archaeological. to the archival aggregates in which formats of photography have been organized. combine a dry. in a kind of renewal of the Neue Sachlichkeit principles of objective observation developed in Germany in the 1920s by photographers ranging from August Sander to Albert Renger-Patzsch. Although his reading of the images deviates from the dry. is rife with ambiva-
lence: having turned the machines into decontextualized pictorial objects. By scanning. Ruff's Machines are "found" images.P" While Dean leaves her images largely in the state in which they are found. making clear its status as an object of ethnographic and anthropological interest. Writing about this body of work.

The same strategy obtains in Study. especially one dependent on the language of appropriation. the source of authority. Glenn Ligon's biting critique of Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs of black men in The Black Book resides in this gap
. the author being. have consistently animated the critical paradigm of a range of postconceptual photographic practices. each photographed in a profile style reminiscent the scenes of representation found in American films and art. A Negro
Prince. she has recently turned to the thriving online economy of ebay auctions. African Youth. In both works. The ethnographic conditions of the archive. her concerns are informed by an analysis of the archival remains of what Toni Morrison describes as American Africanisrn. but here the titles are taken from paintings in which the black male figures as subject or object-underscored by such titles as Study of a Black Man. Archives. the relationship between race and identity in historical representations of blackness in American high art and
(guess who's coming to dinner) (2001) and Study
embedded in this landscape generated from popular depictions and. In this body of work. of nineteenth-century portraits-and
Untitled undertakes this structural repositioning by way of aligning the forty-three oval portraits in vertical rows underneath semitransparent Plexiglas. of certainty. and instead revealed as a source for understanding the codes of the racialized image in popular culture. Incised on the left and right sides of the Plexiglas surface are titles of American films produced from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1960s. and literature.Enwezor
42
such as the cinema. where she has been researching and acquiring institutional films produced during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Simpson adopts the photographic studio as the place to construct what will turn out to be an archival realignment. in its etymological sense. she uses footage from one such film-a three-minute interval in which a teacher instructs a young white boy to draw on a piece of address the invisible ways in which mental health institutions retrain certain segments of paper-to
the American population. Simpson's practice often rigorously specifies the importance of a Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge as a meansthrough which the archival relationship between the black subject and American culture is shorn of sentimentality.P" popular entertainrnent. as Simpson would
insist. Simpson takes a counter-ethnographic approach as a way of entering the archive of the American imagination. In so doing. one describing the gulf between the portrayed black subjects-a woman in Untitled and a man in Study. Working sometimes under the auspices of the artist as ethnographer. the misperceptions proper to the discourse of misrepresentations that produce stereotypes of black subjects. Appropriation was at the forefront of the post modernist dialectic in contemporary art that sought to obliterate the space between an original and its copy. In Jackie (2007). as I have indicated. Similarly. Moreover. Each of the documented paintings is to be found in the collection of an
American museum. are likewise dependent on the function of their manifest authority as the principal source of historical truth. it called into question the relevance of the modernist category of the author. art.?? The photographic works included here-Untitled (2002)-are that is.

the text panels describe the contested ground of this complex issue. Here. In testing the assumption of the putative aura of Mapplethorpe's conservative brand of studio photography. confounding likeness and resembtance. drawn directly from the pages of The Black Book. Essex Hemphill. Positioned in double rows beneath the images. in the silent power of its analysis of the somber fetishization of impoverishment. one which belongs to the archival memory of the American Depression of the 1930s. Isaac Julien. Given this tension between authorship and aura. with implications 103 of their ethnographic content writ large. the nature of authorship itself. conventional issues of authorship must be weighed against the archival methodologies of cultural analysis. it is striking that Howard Singerman would make an argument for the explicit authorial and auratic character of
. At the same time. In other words. the relationship of white enjoyment to debasement of black male sexuality was not Ligon's only concern in this work. and Frantz Fanon. seminal deconstructions of the modernist myths of oriqinality!"' in many of her refabrications of well-known works by a gallery of male artistic eminences. the troubled relationship between race and sexuality. became the centerpiece of his analysis. more profoundly. Evans may be the photographer of these works but not the singular author of the social and cultural phenomenon that engendered them. and the sanctity of copyrighted material.l'" and. He was equally interested in tackling the homophobic invective spewed by right-wing politicians and fundamentalist Christians. placing The Black Book in archival remand. Levine's After Walker Evans (1981) is a controversial work because its principal conceptual strategy goes beyond simple appropriation. the problem of authorship shadows the license taken by Ligon in using Mapplethorpe's images. and critiques of authorship and aura. and the explicit deconstruction of both in Levine's work. over time. original and copy.P? Ligon's reading of Mapplethorpe is against the grain. both in its straightforward archival referencing.100 are central to Sherrie Levine's daring. It must be acknowledged that Levine's rephotographing of Walker Evans's Farm Security Administration (FSA) images was a deliberate provocation. the black male as a popular ethnographic object in American discourse. and its circumscription of gay male sexual agency. In Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991-93). setting it off-kilter. Looming over the field of representation in which the images of the tenant farmers and their families are contained is a cultural Weltanschauung. one is able to go from Evans's work as a set of documentary photographs. to the very nature of their treatment by Levine as so much archival artifact. In a single cut. Kobena Mercer. The issues surrounding postmodernist appropriation.98 However. bluntly challenging the authenticity of a work of art. Ligon engages in a concerted deconstruction of Mapplethorpe's objectification of the black male body as a signal source of sexual stereotyping by using a series of textual commentaries drawn from theorists and commentators such as James Baldwin. Richard Dyer.between authorship and authority. the postmodern work of appropriation echoes Benjamin's explicit point to suggest that what withers is the aura of Mapplethorpe's iconography of black male sexuality. Originally.

Appropriation and parody are key devices in many uses of the archive. that she could playa leading lady. Ransin offered x Miss Richards more money and a new contract to
appear as a mammy in another Southern melodrama. an object. an image that must be taken into account. Each image is coupled with a caption typed on a vintage typewriter. in a sequence of photographs identified as 4. R. photographic mood. as she appeared in a screentest for the film 'Merry-Go-Round. that is to say. 42. 1938. to the archive's specific ethnographic climate. Ransin. Costume. lovers. we follow Richards's carefully annotated story from the earliest images of her as a teenager in Philadelphia in the early 1920s.v'P" This claim for Levine's archival project is at odds with dominant theories that reference Benjamin. Here. casting. an object to be seen." The caption for images 39 and 40 reads: "Fae Richards (center). and. Handwritten notations add another layer of authenticity to this exacting commentary on lost history and memory. claiming they 'clashed' with the Woman' image. Zoe draws from a radically different methodologi-
cal process. the caption reads: "Fae Richards as photographed by Max Hetzl (Monsieur Max). in collaboration with filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. Richards is accompanied by a range of other people: siblings.Enwezor
44
After Walker Evans as a singular work. to the final image of her as an older woman in 1973.' which was never completed.•
. and more than that. lighting. to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. For example. namely through the combination of object. in my view. and performing the life of an imaginary black Hollywood actress Fae Richards (nee Richardson). no doubt because of her blackness. a unique way of reading Levine's After Walker Evans under the explicit manufacture of an archival artifact. Leonard.---. the studio head. Singerman writes that Levine's work challenges the notion of it being mere appropriation or a ghost object by maintaining a distinction: "Against what I perceived as the reduction of the work to its strategy. but she refused. whose accomplishments have disappeared into the pit of American cultural amnesia. The Fae Richards Photo Archive imagines the existence of such an archive of lost stories moldering in trunk boxes in damp basements. to her heyday as a screen ingenue in the 1930s and '40s. it is important to foreground the operative logic of these projects and the ethnographic Leonard's The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-96) methods underlying them. A typical caption includes a detailed annotation fleshing out the characters in the photograph. The studio never allowed these photographs 'Watermelon to be released. in an attempt to show H. an object that can be detached from its framing referent-the work of Walker Evans. Under pressure from both Fae Richards and Martha Page to give
L----~
-._. staging. and 43. styling. I wanted to insist that there was something to look at. for example. friends. Max was the inhouse photographer for Silverstar Studio and also a good friend of Fae's. stages an archival ruse through scripting. and the studios where the images were supposedly photographed are designed to correspond to the period being referenced. misspellings are periodically noted in the typed scripts to indicate where. and parodic invocation of the archive as the space of lost or forgotten stories. In the seventy-eight images that comprise this work. the typewriter skipped a line or dropped a letter.
_
.. Fae posed for these photographs privately. story.

not least because Leonard shows viewers the casting list of the characters.105
. ripped and serrated at the corners. Fae left Silverstar Studio during filming. These strategies are intended to enhance the believability of the overall work but. cracked. The script we nt throuxgh numerous revisions and the title was changed to 'That Voodoo Magic." Period authenticity is further augmented by giving the resulting photographs a treatment of patina-intentionally aged. originally written for Fae. including her relationship with Martha Page. with her dancing in several different 'jungle' costumes while Cassandra Brooke sang the title song.' Fae's part was cut back to little more than a cameo. This is certainly the impression one derives from viewing Vivan Sundaram's images in The Sher-Gil Archive (1995-97). "Red" Indians. (1938). 2002 Gelatin silver print 15 x 20 in.1 x 50. contradictorily. or sepia-toned with a hint of solarization. breaking her contract and severing all ties with Hollywood.Vivan Sundaram. they highlight its produced nature. Willa Clarke (on Fae's right) was cast as Fae's dance partner and sidekick. it is leveraged elsewhere as a form of melancholic return. Whereas the archive is turned into a parody of historical unity and an instrument of socialidentification in Leonard's work. the character of a young vaudeville dancer wa s written into the scree nplay.8 em) Courtesy SEPIA and the artist
Richards a 'leading lady' role. (38.

and the resulting types of social and cultural interactions specific to each particular moment. the artist serves as the historic agent of memory.
\
'\
!
.arstook turns at the camera photographing himself and his family. a noticeable humanist concern drives the analyses found in individual projects. while the archive emerges as a place in which concerns with the past are touched by the astringent vapors of death. the archive unfolds a narrative journey of loss and desire. a Sanskrit scholar who over many ye. be it of race. and inventories generated by the artists. Umrao Singh Sher-Gil. and its cult of sentimentality. we have been exploring the various conditions of the archive. Sundaram's work of memory is also a sly peak into the circumstances of a hybrid Indian family that allows the archive to question the issue of authenticity. In his incisive reading of Richter's Atlas. all the images are printed from the patriarch's negatives and photographs. Sundaram uses well-worn devices of presentation: boxes. Amrita Sher-Gil. Throughout this essay. with their names etched onto the glass cover of the box. and the process of history is reconceived as a structural system of perpetually changing interactions and permutations between economic and ecological givens. and Indira Sundaram. Vivan's mother. "the telling of history as a sequence of events acted out by individual agents is displaced by a focus on the simultaneity of separate but contingent social frameworks and an infinity of participating agents. who will become a modernist artist in Paris. Buchloh noted the "post-humanist and post-bourgeois subjectivity" informing the work. The images consist of the patriarch. its banalization in popular culture. The Sher-Gil Archive details the story of Sundaram's family in turn-of-the-twentieth-century India and Europe. ethnicity. Here. the artist's grandfather. The images are drawn from the rich photographic archive of the family patriarch. class formations and their ideologies. tracing an arc from colonialism to postcolonialism. Despite the degeneration of the photograph under the rapacious machines of mass media. It is both a public commemoration and an inquiry into identity and the meaning of bonds that tie family to race and nationality. On a different level.Enwezor
46
a work that simultaneously evokes the family album and scraps of found photographs. Through these links. and two daughters. especially in the manner in which the archive often serves to classify and unify concerns of disparate provenance. To construct this archival meditation. its evocation of cosmopolitan pleasure laced with ambivalence. the conceptual strategies used to transform the evidentiary and documentary modes of archival materials into profound reflections on the historical condition. taken together these works probe the complex interests artists have developed. particularly as it pertains to photography. his Hungarian wife. the matriarch. This dialectic structured by humanist and posthumanist traditions casts the whole range of archival production within an epistemological context that far exceeds the issues of taxonomies."!"? Within Archive Fever. a line of closely arranged photographs. or nationality. and four lightboxes each bearing an image of a member of the Sher-Gil family. typologies. of the twists and turns of wandering between India and Europe. as well as mnemonic mediation.106 This observation can be applied to the works organized under the auspices of Archive Fever as well. Marie Antoinette.

p. pp. between the For a fascinating exploration of the relationship Ruins (Cambridge. against the tendency of contemporary forms of amnesia whereby the archive becomes a site of lost origins and memory is dispossessed.: MIT Press. The World Viewed: Reflections Ontology of Film. 1999). edited by Richard (New
8 9
Walter Benjamin. practice. see Douglas Crimp. see T.
Mass. ed. On the Museum's Mass. 'The Surplus Value of Images. 129. 1979). 1992). (Cambridge.. enl. on the Mass. T. ed.
. 'A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the post-Medium 2000). the roving documentary respond to situations where professional photographer. especially from mobile phones.: MIT Press. (emphasis in original). document and monument.
11 12 13
5
10
museum and the archive." York: Schocken in Illuminations: Books. Press. Essays and Reflections
Bolton (Cambridge. The Archaeology
of Knowledge
and the Discourse
7
For a critical and extensive discussion Meaning:
of the photographic
archive. in the indeterminate zone between event and image. its relationship
on the legacy of the to the ordering of taxonomy." in W. Foucault. p.
14
6
Increasingly. Marcel Broodthaers Mass. Buchloh. Condition (London: Thames & Hudson. The Archaeology Ibid.
on Language (New York: Pantheon Books. For discussions on the impact of Broodthaers's Benjamin H. J. Yet. 2007
1
Michel Foucault. (Cambridge. 1988). have become the new technology London Underground of candid camera transmission.: MIT Press. the first images of trapped passencontains the implication as users may not be journalists gers were obtained from a passenger who recorded them on his mobile phone camera. viii.
See Rosalind Krauss. 1968). and the
4
dispersal of the archival form. pp. p. 2005). 'The Body and the Archive. The Exiles of Mass. 1993). and degeneration. 76-106. such as the suicide terror attack in the in 2005." in The Contest of Critical Histories of Photography. Mass.
December 5. Mitchell. 130. Demos. archival form in artistic practice. p.: Harvard University See Stanley Cavell. of Knowledge. digital archives.
2
see Allan Sekula. 2007). For an excellent study of the history of Duchamp's valise as an occasion to think simultaneously knowledge.: MIT Press. it is also within the archive that acts of remembering and regeneration occur. Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography See the chapter. J. 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. D. where a suture between the past and present is performed. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. see (Cambridge.destruction. 353. and the practice of self-curation. In cases of serious events.
Ibid..: MIT Press. La boite-en-
3
Quoted in Geoffrey Batchen. 1972). 343-89. This development of displacing present.

to study the "intelligence" For an insider's view and a discussion of the bailie on the and the U. (emphasis in original). see Carol On the Work of Craigie and "The Art of
United Nations resolution prohibiting Tenet. method of wielding proprietary control over knowledge and information. Ibid.nybooks. H. pp. The Archaeology of Knowledge.com/articles/18034. Ibid. Lynne Cooke. I. Mark Danner. Here it is important to note the turn taken from classification.. 1949-1979 (New York: Thames & Hudson. Ibid. This is one of the most p. pp. administration
Foucault. The Archaeology Ibid . see Hans Blix. insight into the multiplicity archaeological. June 9. For a fuller consideration Horsfield:
of Knowledge.. 127. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press.nybooks. Buchloh.
actually say.
pp.' (New York: Kodansha. 2004). p. George declared that the existence of evidence of Iraq's Plan of was a "slam dunk. D. Foucault. Ibid. Ibid. The Archaeology
For a discussion of the relation of the art object or Image and historical time. The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central ASI.nybooks. 2007). 1995.
between the U. The Imperial Archive. G.
.
"paper shuffling") of empire in works such as Rudyard Kipling's Kim. to classified.
38
curatorial. Foster. 118. p. when President Bush needed confirmation administration's producing
47
contention
that Iraq was not in compliance it from conducting
48
of Horsfield's
method. 1998). Bram Stoker's Dracula. The antecedent the fifteenth-century collecting of this form of collecting Wunderkammer. 330-31. and
New
16 17
I. see T. the critic Nancy Princenthal makes a similar observation of the way Horsfield's characterizes work functions within what she as "Slow Time. p. Kim.
20 21 22 33
See Thomas Richards.• p. hllp:/lwww. 118. 1998).
pp. has sprouted to analyze
44 45
Today a veritable industry of publications the intelligence.com/articles/18180. with a or
46
Foucault. Gerhard Richter: Atlas. 1998). 119.
in Craigie Horsfield:
Relation.
40 41 42 43
method of organizing according to a system."
2.N. 116. 7 (emphasis in
At the peak of the planning for the war. The Archaeology original). Montgomerie. as a
a structure of archive theoretical and historical
Richards.
Richards. that the evidence supporting the U. 2005. See the catalogue to the remarkable exhibition Deep Storage. a project which traces the complex methodological archiving
In
the pundits which created the data on which the map of Tibet was put together by the British." October 88 (Spring 1999). p." See Bob Woodward. D. see Rudyard Kipling. p. "The Dilation of Attention: Artforum (January 2004).
for the most famous literary treatment
Art (Munich: Prestel. Out of Actions: Object. Between Performance and the p. and Archiving of essays provides historiographical. for example. 207-14. p. Buchloh. 3. "Slow
Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster. The lmperis! Archive: Knowledge fascinating and ingenious interpretations
and the
Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso. 1993). 130. of Knowledge. 5.
32
See.S. for example. brochure. This collection of epistemological. 3-22. G. pp.Enwezor
48
15
Benjamin H. For a penetrating reflection on the questions and problems of the archive.
of Knowledge.. 3. no. view of cultural and archiving is
3. Ibid. 50-60.S. 1994). lbid. supposedly noncompliance
Armstrong. 6.. "Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive.. the catalogue of the exhibition Out of Actions: Paul Schimmel. Sensuous Apprehension:
a weapons program. of the Royal Geographical pp. hllp:llwww. 329-32. The Imperial Archive. 164-69. 2. chief weapons investigator
31
a year after the war began. 5. see the essay in Deep Storage by Benjamin H. "Report of the Trans-Himalayan Explorations Made During 1868. strategies often
37
Winzen. lbid. 4.
of Imperial information society and the archive systems it supported. unpag. Ibid. infrastructure. "An Archival Impulse: October 110 (Fall 2004). "An Archival Impulse:
making often credited as the origin of the museum function of and display. Disarming Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art. subsequently Proceedings For an official report of the intelligence work of
27
28
36
Hal Foster. At the Center of the Storm: My
Time: Art in America 95 (May 2007).. 2004). inspectors
case for war. In a recent essay.N.com/articles/18131. 116-21. the director of the CIA. and even ethnographic
as a
deployed by artists using the form of the archive to coax a miscellany of objects and images into an overarching history. a book published by the U. (Chicago: of Victorian literature as it (what Richards calls and is preoccupied with the archival production
Foucault. "The Secret Way to War: York Review of Books. 7. Tenet refutes the allegation that he made such a categorical statement concerning the Iraqi weapons program. New York.. pp. p. edited by
Catherine de Zegher (Paris: Jeu de Paume. p. In his recent memoir. contending he did not that his statement was manipulated to mean something Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins. Dia Center for the Arts." See Nancy Princenthal.
3 (1869-70). Deep Storage: Col/ecting. p.
processes
of in
contemporary
art: Ingrid Schaffner and Mallhias Storing. p. lbid. 1962). eds.
4. p.
to analyze the analysis. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression University of Chicago Press. Lisbon: Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian. See Peter Hopkirk. Society of London 14. Wells's Tono-Bungay. "Warburg's Paragon? The End of Collage and Photomontage Europe:
30
in Postwar
See. exh. Erskine Childer's
34 35
23 24 25 26
The Riddle of the Sands. 2006). Ibid.
p.
Jacques Derrida. see George Kubler. hllp:/lwww. Ibid. See George Tenet.

" 1993).
69
Toby Haggith. pp. 2). and cultures that take predominantly image manipulation conspicuous
62
visual form" (pp. "Word. University of Chicago Press. 4 (1998). murders. shot to death in his truck by an unknown killer. 44. Beginning with the mother of four killed by her husband with a shotgun after an argument in Birmingham. Mitchell. G.: Valentine Mitchell. p. July 17. especially in newspapers menting the terror. 98-119. J.50
See Marcel Proust. 1989. "The Conflict of Communications. pp. "Against the Habitual. 113: The source image for Untitled (Death by Gun) came from a searing dramatization black-and-white of the carnage exacted by gunshots in a single week photograph of Evelyn Wiggins. translated by C. the symbolic exchanges between people. 127-68. 131.
in Bardgett and
70
My attention was drawn to this image and the work of Robert Morris by Barbie Zelizer. interest groups. "Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol. 2003).: MIT Press.
study met with hostile reception from both liberals
and conservatives. 46. whose philosophical Giorgio analysis of the Holocaust and the
Wagner. "Boltanski's Human Sciences
11.
History of the
no. 2002)." p. 128-36. 2006). "Warhol Paints History. "Warhol Paints History. forty-four.
63 6'
5. 1-2). Belsen 1945. although her treatment of Morris's complex interpretation
71
of the photograph
of the dead mother found in the
the central impor-
camp proves ultimately generic.
56
66
For a detailed treatment of Boltanski's
oeuvre. Modernism. updated version in Reconstructing Guilbaut (Cambridge. twenty-five. p. 1994). p.
73
W.: MIT Press." Representations 55 (Summer 1996). see W.
One book that I have found especially cogent in recent discussions of the archive is a work by the Itaitan philosopher Agamben. Return of the Real: The AvantGarde at the End of the Century (Cambridge. "The Filming of the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen Its Impact on the Understanding of the Holocaust. and Object: Wall Labels for Robert Morris. J. For a thorough critical assessment of the psychic impact of the firebombing of German cities by Allied air forces. The oft-stated of images in the
52
53
Ibid.
images the quality of pohtical commentary.
He goes on
on to construe such image economy as "more than the dense that prevails in cultures predicated (p." Cesarani. 2000).
55
Buchloh. Stan Douglas (London: Phaidon Press. to the Lacanian idea of trauma as the Stan Douglas. 57. 251. Alabama. pp.
57
58
Christian Boltanski (Paris: Flammarion.
72
tance to human affairs of the image economy. Jean-Christophe Centre Pompidou.
For an analysis connected underpmninq so-called
theory that prepares a critical reading of Warhol's 1996). Yet it is reflection on and magazines. Ore. does not take a neutral." p. 1996). ideas." in Scott Watson." in Picture Theory (Chicago: 1994). thereby detaching these specific victims from the anonymity of daily traumatic events. Spectral Evidence: Mass. "Gerhard Richter's Atlas. 2002). a reported in the pages of Time.
"Return of the Real. "Death in The Photography of Trauma (Cambndge. p. assassinations.
7.
59 60
Wagner. 133. eds. Mitchell. T.
Army's Film and Photographic
DaVId Cesarani. On the Natural History of Destruction House. 89.
collective public dis·course. to Smith. pp. 251 ." October 75 (Winter Baer. His trial in
Germany initiated by radical leftist groups such as the Baader-
. see Hal Foster. that is. edited by Serge
68
memories that bear on its reflection is part of an extended interpretation of the question of "Bare Life. Richard Hobbs. 1998). the iconomy "underlinejs]
of
Chicago Press. Picture Theory. see Suzanne Bardgett and The Witness and the Archive (New York:
Mass." in Hal Foster. Belsen 1945: New Historical
(London and Portland.
67
Mass. 311-32. See also Ulrich
Death in America series. For an extensive discussion footage and photographs of the influence of the documentary of Bergen-Belsen taken by the British Perspectives and Unit.
See Anne Wagner. See Norman G. 1998).
Meinhof in the 1970s and early '80s-in the documentation disinterested
its detailed collection
of
reported in the media. pp. The charged context of the events lends the between victims and claim
51
Scott Watson.. p. Ibid. See Thomas Crow. 1992).
America. eds. or Race in Amenca. Image." See Foster charactenzes
65
Visual Archives: p. see Lynn Gumpert.. and Carol J. things. p. (New York: Random Sebald. K. In Search of Lost Time. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust University of Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago:
61
The term was coined by Terry Smith in The Architecture Aftermath (Chicago: According University of Chicago Press. 2006). This is certainly the issue that must be confronted Front Page. ending with Steve Toomer. edited by Christine van Assche (Paris: Editions du
has lost its special character of appeal because of the power of images as signs of it is important to note that his in 9112
we have become inured to the bombardment media is an oversimplification within this field of skepticism. The Holocaust the Exploitation Finkelstein's Industry: Reflection on of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso. Ennght (London: Chatto & Windus. revised by D. "Warhol Paints History.." p. even if Feldmann deliberately sought not to distinguish perpetrators in in his arrangement that photography of the images. docuand suicides in
75
possible to observe that works like Die Toten-a media images.
stance. 1990).
and incessant consumption"
Feldmann's work has been framed as issuing from an "antiaesthetic" context based on the low character of the images he employs and the lack of fetishistic regard he accords them. p. 37-59." See Giorgio Agamben. 103.: MIT Press. the roll call of each death was memorialized and given a rare national focus. Clover. Though Feldmann's work operates interests extend from the banal and kitsch to the profoundly ethical. Diana Thater.. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Warhol's work as "traumatic realism." Art in America 75 (May 1987). Finkelstein. Royoux. Remnants of Auschwitz: Zone Books.
Eichmann was captured in Argentina by Israeli agents. 127.

Tauris. The revolution will not be televised.
77
Gal Raz. and women will not care if Dick finally gets down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day. brother. The revolution will not go better with Coke. no. 10."
BO
See Janina Struk. 1843-1875 (Cambridge. B. Brother. which had outlawed the death penalty. Raz points out that some critics of The Specialist have accused On this the filmmaker of literal "fraud. or white people. There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
the Evidence (London: I. The revolution will not be televised. the director of Steven Spielberg's Jewish Film Archive.Enwezor
50
Jerusalem ended with a sentence of death. 1981). The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner. Green Acres. Arendt covered the trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker. The revolution will not be televised. Francis Scali Key. NBC will not be able to predict the winner at 8:32 or report from 29 districts. The Dialogic Imagination: (Austin: University of Texas Press. the Photograph Press. forgery and falsification. The Beverly Hillbillies. Engelbert Humperdinck.
Scenes in a Library: Reading Mass.. Black and Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving For just the proper occasion. will not be televised.
. See Mikhail Bakhtin. subsequently extending the as that in reportage as a meditation on what we mean by evil and the aporia that the Holocaust represents as the un representable. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Faber & Faber. 1963). There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay. white lightning. Tom Jones. Flying Dutchman Productions. 10. whose brilliant lecture "Palm Reading: Fazal Sheikh's Handbook of Death.
B6 B5
Talk at 125th and Lenox. p. making him the only Nazi war criminal to be executed in Israel.
Bl
My thanks to Eduardo Cadava. Gil Scott-Heron. The revolution will not be televised. turn on and cop out. You will not be able to plug in. lnterpretetions of the Holocaust: and is unfaithful to the testimonies. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will be no re-run brothers: The revolution will be LIVE. which cannot be fully encapsulated. Johnny Cash. "Actuality of Banality: Eyal Sivan's The Specialist Context. The revolution will not be televised.. The revolution will not get rid of the nubs. Four Essays
http://www. "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox In 4 parts without commercial interruptions. or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance. p.: MIT
in the Book. a tiger in your tank. will not be televised. Skip out for beer during commercials. Carol Armstrong." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary 24.
76
There will be no pictures of you and Willie May pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run.
B3 B4
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas." at San Francisco Art Institute. The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado. 1998). You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom. General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. The revolution will not be televised.theatlasgroup. See. 9. nor sung by Glen Campbell. 1 (Fall 2005). p. and ultimately led to the inclusion of these photographs
B2
See this and other documents
in the Atlas Group Archive at
news and no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose. or the Rare Earth. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay. The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell. 2004)."
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkins strolling through Walls in a Red. and Hooterville
issue she cites Hillel Tryster. for whom "the original footage of the trial was manipulatively edited by Sivan in a way that insults the witnesses Ibid. Photographing
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip. alerted me to the implications the exhibition.org/aga. or the giant in your toilet bowl. Because the revolution will not be televised.
Hannah Arendt. of this aspect of Sheikh's
In
work. There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process. because the revolution will not be televised. will not be televised." in Small 1970.html. The entire poem reads: You will not be able to stay home. for example. The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb.
Journal of Jewish Studies
7B 79
lbid. artist statement. The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

"Seeing Sherrie Levine. 129. "Repetition Abrams. by freeing the hand from constituting receivership for considerations
directly. "The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity" ation of existing images. "Time Machines: Concepts Caroline Flosdorff and Velt Gomer (Stuttgart: pp." p. Ibid. 1967). suggesting since Dean lives and works in Berlin. New Delhi: Hungarian Information & Cultural
given the lengthy interventions
medium since Its inception. Re-take (New Delhi: Tulika Booksra." p." as "fake" Walker Evanses. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Black Skin. Prior to (p.
91
Godfrey (ibid. first introduced by Fanon in 1952.. "Gerhard RIchter's Atlas. must be paired with
On this level.
Benjamin.
Ibid. the recourse is to think of these images as "inauthentic. 2003). p. White Masks (New York: Grove Press. For further discussion Iconography of these issues in Simpson's and Differentiation:
and the Literary work." in Glenn Ligon: Un/becoming. of this work." in Lorna Simpson (New York: of the homoerotic implications of this work
See also the discussion
in Richard Meyer. Floh (Gottingen: accumulation
Steidl.
89
103
According
See Tacita Dean. pp.
98
Lorna Simpson's
of the Racial Sublime. " Dernda. pp. edited by
94 96
Ibid. Buchloh. and Beaumont Newhall.7-18. Caroline Flosdorlf.
99
Voices: Glenn Ligon and the Force of edited by Judith Art. 1996). these Implications have been all
. Katalin Keseru." Grand Street 62 (Fall 1997). namely in essays by Lincoln Kirstein.
88
the function of the archon as that of the work of power . the mechanical apparatus engenders new modes of of what a work of art is.
96
See Toni Morrison.
Ruff's Cycle Machines. The archival appropriaura. 102-31. inappropriate photographic a term with a great deal of ambiguity. The Originality Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge.
1985)." October 114 (Fall 2005). lnstitute of Contemporary
Language. and into the in
106 107
2001). p. see Vivan Sundaram. influence in continues to reverberate and has been a theoretical
the work of artists such as Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon. and the authority who presides over the archival field: "archontic unification. Lloyd Fonvielle..
vision.
93
of Reality in Thomas Hatje Cantz. 3. 12.. The Sher-Gil Archive (Bombay: Gallery Chemould. 1997).) devotes a lengthy part of his otherwise fine essay to this issue of "de-skilling. For further discussions of 'Amnta': Digital Photomontages
Dean's Floh. of aura and indirectly a work Benjamin (ibid. pp. The importance of this concept.: MIT Press. In her powerful writings. 80. 90-119. See Howard Singerman. "Borrowed Tannenbaum (Philadelphia: pp. of the AvantMass. to Howard Singerman.87
See Pierre Bourdieu. p." to wit. 2006).
92
See Hal Foster's influential essay "The Artist as Ethnographer. pp." Return of the Real. 73. of identification. Floh is the that the initial site for the
but repressed by certain types of writing around the work.. a likely supposition Found and Lost: On Tacna
1994). "The Sher-Gil Archive.13-35.) discusses the implications
100
authorship whereby." October 67 (Winter
104 105
German term for flea market. Derrida describes
(New York:
given this line of thinking a deeply reflexive reading in relation to contemporary
102
art. 1992). this. Krauss has
. thereby amplifying and glorifying the superiority of the putative original as a work of unique
artistic
the keeper. See Frantz Fanon. the power of consignation. gathers the functions of of classification. Archive Fever. 220). through the act of rephotographing. so See Mark Godfrey. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness Imagination (New York: Vintage Books. evinces another layer in the Course of diminishing
101
Rosalind Krauss's important book. the trustee. 2001).." in Thomas Ruff: Machines. 221. Peter Nagy. 78-107. is one of the many forms of criticism developed along the lines of Benjamin's thought. p. Benjamin says. 171-203. "Photography
of the 163 images was Germany. Centre. The Field of Cultural Production Columbia University Press. see
97
Okwui Enwezor. 1993)..